2010 — 17 November: Wednesday
The barometer's in a "rapid decline" sort of mood this morning,1 but the heating system is holding up. First cuppa is completing my rebooting process. I must say it's rather gloomy out there — in contrast to the jaunty choices on BBC Radio 3 so far. Not a hint of blue in the sky. A day to stay indoors, I predict. And three foot floods not far from where I camped in Cornwall 40 years ago...
The bicameral mind
One of the books on my shelves is the unsnappily-titled "The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind" by the late Julian Jaynes. It's not a barrel of laughs, but bits of it continue to echo in what passes, these days, for my mind nearly 20 years "down the road". Particularly intriguing are his speculations on schizophrenia and religious hallucinations. Now, this morning — instead of sensibly eating breakfast — I've just read an entirely different hypothesis positing2 a retroviral (HERV-W) cause that has also been implicated in MS. It seems the more we know, the less we know. (Source.)
Food! Now!! It's 10:17 and a bit drizzly out there.
Silly boy!
Fancy thinking a "superstore" called "PCWorld" would stock (or even know what) an IDE to SATA power connector is. I must still have a bicameral mind. It all started a couple of hours ago, while I was looking for something completely different (of course) and I found an unused 320GB SATA hard drive,3 still in its antistatic bag. So I naturally thought to myself: I've got a spare SATA port on the motherboard of the black beast — why not make this 320GB drive my operating system disc and save the two 1TB drives purely for data? Sounded like a plan to me.
But (for reasons I don't ever intend to explore) the power supply fitted in my Novatech barebones all-SATA system has only IDE type connectors, hence my latest expedition. I should have gone direct to Maplins in the first place, I guess, but that's where I ended up, having cheekily parked in the Aldi carpark in Bevois Valley. I haven't been inside that Aldi (one of Christa's favourite destinations) for over three years. Quite heavy rain and a minor-league wheel spin or two, but nothing too life threatening. And now (at 13:53) I've not only wolfed down another enhanced chicken salad but also just received a £50 bonus from ERNIE. Last time I looked, he seemed to have skipped me this month. I'm not complaining! :-)
Won't be able to pay it in until my local A&L branch has finished its metamorphosis into a Santander branch. I can wait.
Scary, or what?
Having whacked the new drive into the black beast, shifted all the SATA data cables around, and tried to ensure that Mr 320GB is (being on port 1) the drive booted from, I was a little surprised to see it tagged as Disk 1 rather than Disk 0. Nonetheless, I've stated that's where I wish to install Windows. It recognised the Linux system as not being NTFS and thus refused to countenance putting Windows on what had been the boot drive.
Installing Windows... That's all the information we need right now. Your computer will restart several times during installation.
It's barely 10 minutes into the process and claims to be 87% through the process of expanding Windows files. Haven't been asked to format or partition anything yet. [Pause] It claims to be completing installation. Goodness: it's just picked up the full resolution of the 1920x1200 screen. Badness: it's just lost the ability to move the (USB) mouse pointer. I refuse to worry at this stage. 20 minutes in and counting.
[Long pause] The only sign of progress (if that's what it is) is a string of three full stops constantly appearing, one by one, and then disappearing after the bold (and unticked) phrase "Completing installation". There's also a pale green bar gradually moving across the bottom of the screen, somewhat more slowly than paint drying. It's about two thirds of the way across and we're now at 55 minutes elapsed time. There's been just one automatic restart so far. I seem to recall XP would fall over itself (as it were) extolling all its many virtues, which at least gave you something to read. By comparison, Windows 7 is either tight-lipped, or just plain sulky.
I gave up and started reading one of today's deliveries, which is so far utterly gripping (and a lot scarier than Windows 7). When I next glanced at the screen it was blankly black. I switched off the PC, replumbed the mouse into a different USB port, powered back on and, next thing I know, I'm finalising various settings in what seems to be a fully functional Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit system. Very pretty it is, too. Having downloaded, installed, and scanned with the Security Essentials antivirus (etc) program, it's now chewing on 44 security updates and asking me to restart it so it can update system files. Applying 51,801 update operations, many to the Registry — what jolly fun. 'Twas ever thus. 80 seconds to login.
I may yet take the Internet Explorer 9 beta out for a whirl. Mind you, I've also got to find out how to teach it (it seems) about those two lumps of 1TB hard disk, neither of which is currently known to the system through any window I can see. Yet both of which were detected during the initial phases of installation. Most odd. 'Twas ever thus.
Getting there
Both 1TB disks are now online (though I wasn't clever enough to stop Win7 from grabbing its "hidden" 100MB system partition on one of them, so they're slightly different sizes!) and I think I may even have managed to relocate the "My Documents" folder to one of them. We shall see. I've also grabbed the latest driver for my ATI Radeon graphics card — according to the "Windows Experience" assessment of the performance of various key components, the graphics card is very much letting the side down. On a scale of 1.0 to 7.9, processor and RAM both deliver 7.5, whereas desktop performance for the "Aero" GUI is a mere 3.7. the gaming graphics 5.8 and the primary hard drive 5.9. It's also still possible to ignore Aero, knock all the eye candy on the head, and drop right back to a Windows NT appearance :-)
It's interesting to see just how much compute power can be soaked up by the superficial "glamour". Time (18:52) to stop playing and grab a bite to eat.
Having finished the book (Faber's first novel, apparently) I don't think I'll be looking out for the film version. The psychedelic item is a throwback to 1967, but with new interviews from Roger Waters and Nick Mason. The film is from Matthew Vaughn:
And the tea is from my kitchen! It's 22:12 already.